Exit 9 by Brett Battles Page B

front door of the Bluff.
    There should be only four more guards in the main house, none currently expecting any trouble. The four who had come looking for them had all been permanently eliminated, as had the three who had been sent out to check the problem with the fence.
    “Like we drilled,” the woman—Karie—instructed as they reached the front door.
    Gleason unlocked the door with the keys he’d taken from one of the guards, and pushed it open. No gunshots. No feet pounding toward the entrance. No voices shouting at them.
    Quietly, they slipped inside. Within three minutes, the four remaining guards were all accounted for and dealt with. The team reassembled in the lobby where Karie, after a quick look at the map of the house’s layout, said, “This way.”
    __________
     
    J ANICE HUMPHREY had been asleep in her room upstairs. It was early, but she was suffering from a cold. That was the only reason she was at the Bluff at all. She and her husband, Michael, had been called to the Ranch for a meeting, but Michael had insisted she stay and he would fill her in later.
    So, drugged up with cold medicine, she had slept the afternoon away, and was surprised when she finally woke to see that it was starting to get dark outside. She was just grabbing a tissue when her door opened, and Robert Lieber, one of the Bluff’s security officers, ran inside.
    “Out the window,” he said quickly.
    “What?” she asked, thinking she wasn’t hearing correctly.
    “There are hostiles in the house!”
    She stumbled off the bed. “How did that happen?”
    “I don’t know, but we don’t have time to talk about it. Ma’am, you need to go out the window and hide on the roof. They won’t look for you there.”
    Even with a head slowed by a cold, Janice got his message. She ran over to the dormer window and threw it open. A cold blast of air hit her in the face. All she had on were the sweats she’d been sleeping in. They weren’t going to be enough.
    Lieber seemed to sense this, too. He ripped the top cover off the bed and shoved it at her. “Take this. Now go, hurry!”
    The roof outside Janice and Michael’s room had a gentle slope, but losing her balance was a very real possibility in her condition. If she did, the only thing that would stop her descent was the ground. She held the window frame tightly as she climbed out into the growing twilight.
    “Try to get above the window. They won’t look there,” Lieber suggested. “But once you’re settled, don’t move around.”
    “Aren’t you coming with me?”
    “My job is to try to stop them.” He pushed the rest of the bedspread out the window after her.
    “They’ll kill you! It’s not worth it.”
    “Please,” he said. “Go.”
    Then she understood. It wasn’t the Bluff he was trying to protect. It was her. The bedroom had obviously been occupied. The intruders would have to find someone there.
    “Go!” he repeated.
    With a sense of helplessness, she did as he told her, working her way above the dormer, then lying against the roof.
    Lieber, no doubt to mask the cold air in the room, left the window partially open. Because of this, she could hear the door to her room open, and the gunshots that followed. A moment later, the window opened all the way again. From her vantage point, she could see the back of someone’s head looking out. As much as she hoped it was Leiber, she knew it wasn’t. He would have called to her, let her know it was okay.
    After several seconds, the window shut all the way, and the light in her room went out.
    __________
     
    B WHAP—BWHAP—BWHAP.
    The detention area was the trickiest part. As simple as it would have been to toss the remaining container of toxin through the door, the cells were not airtight, so there was a very good chance the detainees would have been killed, too. Four of them wouldn’t have mattered, but if the fifth had died, it would have defeated the entire purpose of the mission. For that reason, the